Emerging Investigators

The following authors, whose papers are published in this issue, were invited to submit their work for the Journal of Environmental Monitoring 2010 Emerging Investigators issue. Unfortunately they didn't make the dedicated issue in time (see J. Environ. Monit., 2010, 12, issue 11), but we publish them in this issue and profile them below.

We couldn't resist asking some of these outstanding up-and-coming environmental scientists the following questions. As you will see their answers make thought-provoking reading:

1. What interested you about this field of research?

2. What are the greatest difficulties you face as a researcher working on environmental issues?

3. In your opinion, what is the most important research question in environmental science?

Hans Peter H. Arp

Hans Peter H. Arp is from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He obtained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich), Switzerland (2007) under the supervision of Kai-Uwe Goss and René P. Schwarzenbach. He is currently pursuing diverse environmental research interests and international collaborative efforts related to environmental organic chemistry, environmental monitoring and remediation as a researcher at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in Oslo, Norway. Outside work, he enjoys writing stories, travelling, reading literature, sampling beer, being skeptical and performing comedy.

(1) The inter-disciplinary nature of environmental science interested me the most, and still does. I'm continuously being challenged into learning new concepts. Best of all doing environmental science just feels likes a responsible thing to be doing.

(2) Communicating outside the field, including with funding agencies, can be difficult. Many have a black and white view of environmental problems, asking questions like “is it polluted or not”. It can be hard, very hard, to get the nuances across.

(3) There are too many important questions now. But I think with the lessons learned thus far, we need more research on ecosystem recovery dynamics and on identifying sustainable industry and technologies.

Susan Bengtson Nash

Dr Susan Bengtson Nash found her passion for environmental toxicology as an honours student investigating the effects of contaminants on harbour porpoise ovarian histology at Plymouth University, England. After completing her PhD on bioassay development at the University of Queensland, Australia, she established the Southern Ocean Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP) Program which aims to fill some of the significant research gaps outlined within this article. Susan holds an appointment at Griffith University's Atmospheric Environment Research Centre (AERC), Australia, with research projects focusing on the input, distribution and effects of POPs within the Southern Ocean ecosystem.

(1) As an undergraduate in the late 1990s, many exciting developments were being made in environmental toxicology including for example the call by UNEP for global action on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Since learning of the long range transport capabilities of POPs, Polar environmental toxicology has drawn my focus. Returning to Australia for my PhD research, led me to question the South Polar scenario and it is these questions that continue to drive our research today.

(2) As researchers we also play a role as advisors to policy makers. A significant challenge is to strike a balance between this role in the provision of rapid and effective responses to current environmental issues, whilst ensuring that we are simultaneously investing limited funding into research of longevity. That is, filling the basic knowledge gaps that will allow us to address the environmental challenges of tomorrow.

(3) Environmental sustainability takes on different meanings depending on the field and environmental pressure under discussion. The ecological implication and concern however is the same i.e. will we reach a threshold where ecosystem form and function unravels? The most pressing research questions are those that consider the cumulative effect of diverse pressures and seek to understand and predict how these will manifest at the ecosystem level.

Nicholas Howden

Dr Nicholas Howden is Senior Lecturer in Water in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol. Nicholas is a hydrologist and hydrogeologist. He graduated from the University of Durham in 2000 and then completed a NERC-funded PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College with CASE support from the British Geological Survey Hydrogeology Group in Wallingford. Nicholas was Lecturer in Soil and Water Engineering in the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University (2007 to 2010), and Principal Consultant for White Young Green (2004 to 2007).

(1) My research is focussed around the broad theme of understanding short- and long- term trends in river water quality (chemistry). This includes improving our understanding of how we separate natural and anthropogenic effects on freshwater quality. The issue addressed in this paper arose from referees' comments to a previous manuscript that highlighted how analyses of monitoring data could easily give ambiguous and/or erroneous results if the period of monitoring was too short. But what do we mean by short, short- and long-term? In the short-term hydrological responses tend to be dominated by variability (i.e. “noise”) but in seeking to identify underlying trends (i.e. “signal”) it is essential that we know the period of time over which the two may be separated. Our interest here was to see whether we could use some underlying understanding of hydrological systems to develop a “rule of thumb” for a preferred time period over which appropriate assessments may be made.

(2) There is no integrated and coherent strategy for monitoring the freshwater environment at a national scale and, whilst there have been considerable efforts to collect data in the past, it is often the case that these data resources have been lost or simply discarded over time. The longer a record of water chemistry, the more valuable it becomes to scientists. I have spent the last three years collecting and collating long (>30 years) records of water chemistry, but they are few and far between. In trying to separate the effects of climate and land use change, we need to look at time periods of decades, as environmental systems can have very long response times.

(3) Very simply, how does it all fit together? In other words, how do small-scale manipulation experiments represent what happens at larger spatial and temporal scales, and how do we integrate understanding and results from different disciplines within environmental science to improve our understanding of environmental functioning at large spatial scales over long time periods?

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